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If I don't live in the USA...
Can I order from Amazon.com?

Briefly:Yes, if you have a credit card. You can order
books, CDs, and DVDs for direct shipment to almost any country. But for most
other items (hair products, shoes, clothing, jewelry, electronics, cell
phones, etc), you will need to use a package forwarding service
(explained below) to accomplish the
shipping and delivery.

As far as the
hair products,
shoes,
products for nails,
perfumes,
jewelry, and
cell phones, that you see on my site,
I am a sales agent for Amazon.com, which is
a USA company that sells everything you can think of over the Internet. It
is very convenient for orders within the USA, but ordering for delivery to
other countries often requires an extra step (keep reading...)

In this page I explain how to order products from Amazon.com for delivery to
different countries. I don't know where to find stores that sell these
products in different parts of the world. Nor can I buy them for you and
send them to you personally. I am not a wholesaler or a distributor,
I can't sell the products in bulk at a discount; for more about
that please see my Frequently Asked
Questions page.

The first time you make an order is the most difficult because you
have create an account for yourself on Amazon.com and then, if you don't live in the USA, you might also have to sign
up with a package forwarding service. But once you have done these
things, you don't have to do them again; you can order whenever you wish
just as easily as if you were in the USA.

Before you can shop at Amazon.com or any other website, you need an
electronic mail address (email, e-mail). If you don't have an email
address, you can get one for free at Google (gmail), MSN (Hotmail), Yahoo,
AOL, and lots of other sites.

1. Payment

To shop at Amazon, you need a
Mastercard, Visa, American Express, Discover, Diners
Club credit card (or a debit card that acts as one of these credit
cards). OR.. An Amazon.com Gift Card.
There is also an Amazon Visa, which you will be offered every time you
buy something, but the application says “You must be a U.S. resident
to apply”.

If you don't have a credit card, the easiest thing will be to ask a
friend or relative who has one, and who also has an Amazon account, to place
an order for you. Once you have credit card and email, come back here and
learn how to order for yourself!

Payment is in US Dollars (USD). When “proceed to
checkout” Amazon shows you the total amount of your order in US
Dollars and in your local currency. Amazon.com doesn't care
if your credit card is registered in a USA bank or in a bank in another
country. If the bank that issued your credit card is not in the USA, it
will convert the price of the items you buy from dollars into your local
currency (perhaps deducting a fee for doing this). In some cases,
however, such as in Venezuela,
there might be limits on the amount of local currency you can convert to
dollars.

To convert from US dollars to your local currency, you can use an Internet
currency converter such as these:

2. Language

Amazon.com is an English-language website. It does not present
itself in Spanish or any other language. If you speak Spanish, I have a page with step-by-step instructions in Spanish for
using Amazon. If you speak English, the Amazon pages should be
self-explanatory except for international shipping, which I explain here.

Amazon does have sites in some other countries like France, Germany, Japan,
and Spain, but those sites do not sell the same things as Amazon.com, which
is in the USA, and most of them will not ship outside their own country or
area. Most of the products in Aleida.net such as Dominican hair products
are available only from Amazon.com in the USA.
I have no experience ordering from the other Amazon sites, but of course you
can look at them to see if they have something you need that is not
available from Amazon.com, or that can be shipped to you more easily. If
you have registered with Amazon.com, you can sign in to any of these other
sites except the ones in Japan and China.

3. International Shipping

Unless stated otherwise on the page of a particular product,
Amazon ships all products to all states and territories of the USA,
including Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands and to APO, FPO, and DPO
addresses (overseas US military and diplomatic installations).

In addition Amazon.com has an Amazon Global program that
ships certain items to certain countries directly:

But in most cases, you will need to sign up with a package
forwarding service to order from Amazon.com, as I describe below. These services give you a USA address;
Amazon ships your order to that address, which is really the address of the
package forwarding service, and the package forwarding service sends the
package to you in your country.

Having signed up with a package forwarder,
now you can order from any site on the Internet, not just Amazon but
also eBay, Target, Victoria's Secret, Gap, Old Navy, Staples, Bebe, whatever
you want, whenever you want. You just put your USA address as the shipping
address, and the forwarding service does the rest.

The shipping cost and delivery time depend on:

The product itself; each product has its own shipping fees and schedules;

The delivery option you choose at Amazon (regular, 2-day, overnight);

The policies and procedures of your package forwarding service;

The import policies and procedures of your country.

WARNINGS: If Amazon.com doesn't ship a certain product to your
country, it might (or might not) be for a reason. For items such as
computers, laptops, cell phones, and other electronics or devices, the
warranty or guarantee might not be valid outside the USA. Also, such
products might not be compatible with the electrical service or radio
frequency allocations or digital formats of your country. Some items might
not be permitted under the export laws of the USA or the import laws of your
country, or there might be customs duties to pay.

IN MORE DETAIL...

Amazon has its own shipping policy, which is described HERE.
Amazon ships books, CDs, DVDs, and video tapes to any country, but in
general, other items (such as beauty products) are shipped only to the USA,
its protectorates (such as Puerto Rico), and to United States military APO and
FPO addresses. This is because of United states export laws, and/or the
import laws of the other country, or warranty or service restrictions (CLICK HERE to read
about exportaton of beauty products).

But to complicate matters, many (perhaps most) items you can order in
Amazon.com are not shipped by Amazon itself, but by
third-party sellers (separate companies), each of which has its own
shipping terms and and policies.

So when ordering a specific item, there is often no way to tell if it can
be delivered outside the USA, or to any specific country, other than
trying to place the order and specifying the desired delivery address.
If the order is accepted, it will be shipped; otherwise, Amazon prints a
message like this:

Important Message
There is a slight problem with your order. (See below.)

We're sorry. This item can't be shipped to your selected
destination. You may either change the shipping address or delete the item
from your order by changing its quantity to 0 and clicking the update button
below. (See geographical restrictions.)

If you receive this message you can cancel the order, or you can
sign up with a package forwarding
service to get a USA address where the item can be delivered and
then forwarded to your real address. Once have registered with such a
service, you can use it any time you order anything from any USA-based
website.

Items sold and shipped by Amazon Affiliates...

Many of the hair and beauty products and other items that you find
on my website are sold by affiliates, not directly by Amazon. Each
affiliate is free to set its own shipping policy, and some of them ship to
more countries than Amazon does.

So to find out if a product can be shipped to your country, look on the
Amazon page for that product. Each product page has a Product
Details section that tells where it can be shipped and gives a link to
shipping rates and policies. (Next to where it says Shipping weight,
click the “View shipping rates and policies” link.)

One of the Amazon affiliates that handles many of these products, on its
shipping page (CLICK
HERE TO READ IT) says that it will also ship to Canada, Europe, Asia,
and “Outside USA, Europe, Canada, Asia”, but the shipping
charges can be rather high. Here is a typical shipping "Region Key", which
defines exactly what is meant by Europe, Asia, etc. Notice at the end the
definition for “Outside USA, Eur., CA, Asia”, which I have highlightedin
color.

As you can see, in this case the product can not be shipped to any Latin
American country except Mexico and Brazil, so you will not be able to order
it for delivery to (for example) Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Perú,
Colombia, or any other Latin American country besides Mexico and Brazil.

Since I do not handle these products personally, I can not send products to
you myself. If your country is not listed in the product's Region Key, then
consider signing up with a package forwarding service(keep reading…)

If the product I want can't be shipped to my country or the shipping is too
expensive?

It is a common problem that USA companies will not ship packages to
certain countries or, in some cases, will not ship internationally at all.

How do I know if a certain product ships directly to my country? Any
answer to this question would be very complicated, especially for
Amazon.com. Instead, just try to fill in your real address as the shipping
address. If it is accepted, that answers the question. If not, or if you
can't even choose your country from a menu, that means the answer is no, in
which case you should keep reading this section.

In other cases, they will ship to your country, but the cost is prohibitive.
The solve these problems, international mail and package
forwarding companies will provide you with a shipping address in the
USA to which your mail or packages are delivered, and from there they will
ship them to you at your own address in your own country. You can use this
service with Amazon.com,
eBay, Target, and any other place where you would shop online.

Companies other than Amazon.com...
Some companies require
not only a USA
shipping address, but also a USA billing address because
(a) the seller checks the billing address you provide with your
credit card company to make sure they agree, and (b) the web form
they use to collect the billing address accepts only USA addresses. To
handle this situation, it is supposedly possible to register the USA address
that you have received from the package forwarding company as a
“secondary billing address” with your credit card company.

But in other cases, even if you have a USA shipping address and a USA
billing address, a given merchant might accept payment only by credit cards
that were issued by a USA bank.

Then there is question of your telephone number. The seller might also
require you to enter a USA phone number. And it is possible that they might
even check it with your credit card company.

when choosing a package forwarding service, you should find out if they
handle all of these situations. If you are buying only from Amazon,
you should be able to enter a non-USA billing address and phone number.
Other sites might not allow this.

The following table lists some package forwarding services that you can find
on the Internet. Note that as of July 2015, there are only about 195
countries in the world, so when a company says it ships to more than 220
different countries, it's because they are counting territories
(like American Samoa) or overseas states (like Guadeloupe) as countries.

Can I order from Amazon.com and ship to INDIA? This has been a very
frequent question at Aleida.net recently. The answer is YES. In the
table below, most of the companies that say "more than 200 countries" or
"almost every country" or "anywhere in the world" or "everywhere" ship to
India. Besides those there are several companies that specialize in
shipping to India; just do a text search (Ctrl-F in most browsers) for
"India" in the table (or look for India in the second column).

If you would like to share your experience with one of these services, or
you would like to suggest a new one, please
contact me.

4. Shopping

Here are my shopping pages; each one comes in a Spanish and an English
version. Please don't ask me for a catalog or a price list; I don't have
one. Inventories change every day, and so do prices. When you see an image
of a product (like the one on the left), you can click on it; this takes you
to the Amazon page for that product, where you can see the price, get
more information about it, and order it if you wish.

5. Questions?

If you have questions, please check my Frequently Asked Questions page (FAQ), where
I have answers for most of the questions that come up.
If you don't find the answer you're looking for, you can
contact me and I'll try to help.
But please look at the FAQ first because I get a lot of emails every day
asking about things that are already explained there.

Aleida Morel
★Dominicanidades
New York City, New Jersey, Connecticut
In association withAmazon.com

Aleida.net is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program,
an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to
earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to
Amazon.com.